Digital Contact Tracing - a mini series in 4(+1) parts
What is digital contact tracing? How can it be done while respecting privacy? Did it work? And what can we learn for the future? Read on and find out.
When people ask me “what have you done during the COVID-19 pandemic”, I usually answer “digital contact tracing”.
While I’ve done other things as well - heading a digital epidemiology expert group in the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Taskforce, presiding the national research program on COVID (NRP-78), or accidentally becoming the most quoted scientist in the Swiss media in 2020 - my involvement in the development of digital contact tracing is what I am most proud of. It is also what I think will have the longest-lasting impact.
Digital contact tracing was the largest rollout of digital epidemiology technology ever, and likely will remain so for some time. For a newsletter that is all about digital epidemiology, it’s worth diving into the topic. Because there’s a lot to be said, I’ll split it up in 4 sections - what it is, how privacy was preserved, whether it worked, and what’s next. I’ll try to spice it up here and there with personal anecdotes that I haven’t shared elsewhere.
The title says 4+1 parts, because this is part 0, which is just the introduction to the topic. I’d like to make a few comments before starting with the series.
First, I am trying to keep an open mind about the pros and cons of digital contact tracing. I am keenly aware that my position quite close to the center of the action puts me at great danger to be biased - to promote the evidence that digital contact tracing worked, and to ignore the evidence that it didn’t. My view, as you will see, is that if digital contact tracing is done well, it can be a very powerful tool to mitigate disease outbreaks. Whether it can be powerful enough to stop a pandemic is an open question. Technologically, and in principle, it could be. Practically speaking, I doubt it, in the same way that no single measure is able to prevent a pandemic. As you’ll see towards the end of the series, my conclusion is that we should invest much more in making the technology and the surrounding processes better for “next time”.
Second, just because I am a digital epidemiologist does not automatically mean that I like all digital approaches. To bring home the point, I was quite strongly and publicly opposed to digital certificates to prevent people from accessing venues. This has not made me many friends, to put it mildly - particularly not in my community. But as I keep saying, during the pandemic, I was not in the friend-making business; I was in the business of developing digital epidemiology methods that I thought were useful and proportionate. I was uncertain about the usefulness of digital certificates, and I certainly didn’t think they were proportionate. Once it became clear that we would need a certificate at least for international travel, I tried to minimize damage and argue for privacy preserving solutions.
Lastly, I was initially deeply frustrated by the reactions of people who had very little experience with digital epidemiology, but who knew, right from the start, that “digital contact tracing will never work”. I understand that everybody had an opinion on the pandemic, or about what to do, and the media (social and traditional) had a field day in amplifying contrarian voices. As a consequence, I now have even more respect for people who build technology. On the flip side, my hope that society can implement technological solutions to address serious short-term problems has essentially evaporated, because of these communication dynamics. But because such dynamics tend to run out of steam eventually, I remain optimistic for technology to solve longer-term problems. Count me in for the team that will try to “science the shit out of this” next time.
Ok, off we go, part 1 coming very soon. I promise the other parts will be less personal and more professional. But every now and then you’ll have to indulge me 😉 .